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“Winning” is a happy word for lawyers but not an appropriate one for divorce,” Purves says. “Divorce is sometimes necessary but always lousy. Nobody wins. It is a public admission of failure - either you made a stupid decision when you got married, or else one or both of you has deteriorated into a nastier person.”

Readers might be interested in following this link to a novel take on the gay marriage debate. It is by Tony Allright who is probably best described as a libertarian rather than a conservative. Coming from this perspective, which tends to stress individual freedom above all else, his argument is especially interesting in that it still ends up coming down on the pro-traditional marriage side.

This is an excellent column by Camilla Cavendish in today's London Times. Her basic point is that the modish argument that family diversity should be defended at all costs is at variance with the reality of family forms such as cohabitation and single parenthood.

The US magazine, City Journal, has a very interesting article in the current issue dealing with the worldwide rise of the Single Young Female (SYF). The piece, by Kay Hymowitz, says that the Carrie Bradshaw type (she’s the Sarah Jessica Parker Sex and the City), has gone global. She’s to be found in Dublin, London, Warsaw, Tokyo, Seoul, and, of course, in the home of the species, New York.

The Department of Education in Britain has recently come out with a fascinating report called ‘Faith in the System’. It was drawn up in conjunction with the major faith groups in the UK. It could hardly be more positive towards religious schools. A few things should be noted about this report. Note first of all that Britain currently has a Labour government which might have been expected to be suspicious of faith-based schools and yet can still produce a document like this.

"If I were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal...The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.."

Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, "Growing up with a single parent: What hurts, what helps."